The Wow Factor

25 March 1999 - Evan Kleiman

When I told my friends and family that I had just bought a new iMac, I got pretty much the same response: "Eww! A Mac!!! Gross."

I was quite unpleased with this response, so I set my mind on getting these people to like my new Mac. I showed it to some of my P.C. (Pretty Crummy Computer) friends.

At first all of my potential converts said, "It's green!" This color alone wowed them, but then I turned it on.

The first thing they noticed was that I only need to hit one button. Remember, there are only a few types of Windoze machines that are in one unit. My friends were slowly starting to like this computer.

Now it was time to show more than the visual features of the iMac. Once they saw the Welcome to Macintosh screen, they said that they thought the iMac looked very user friendly. This was because any of you who have ever turned on a Windoze machine made more than a year ago will notice that you get a black screen with text at start up. This screen is quite unfriendly.

Just 22 seconds later, my finder appeared. Now they saw how cool it really looked. Now it was time to make it perform. I quickly turned on Apple's free speech recognition software (found at <http://www.apple.com/macos/speech/>). I then said, "iMac, tell me a joke!" And, it did.

Now my friends were definitely wowed. They had seen it boot very fast and seen it tell a joke. My friends were hooked. Now they no longer say, "Eww, a Mac."

They say, "I can't wait until I get mine."

I guess I'm a good seller. 

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